by Dell Shannon
"Benson. Chris Benson." He sat down and studied them one by one.
"You think you can give us some information about Mrs. Stromberg? Did you happen to see her that Friday night?"
"No," said Benson. "I hadn't seen her in more than a year and a half. I must say you all look like sensible men. I thought it over some time before I came in. I didn't know but what I'd get laughed at, and nobody likes that much. But the more I thought, I thought it was something you ought to know. I own a tailoring shop up on Ivar in Hollywood. I'm a widower—my wife died of cancer four years ago. Now I'm going to tell you about this plain, no point beating around the bushes. I suppose we're all men of the world like they say, and realize that just because somebody's got to be fifty, sixty years old, they don't necessarily lose interest in that old devil sex." He got out a packet of little thin brown cigars, sniffed one and lit it. "My wife had been sick for a couple of years before she died. Now, gentlemen, I've got too much sense to go out and pick up with a cheap hooker—and I'd feel a little strange with a young girl. All the women I know, mostly, were Nellie's friends—social acquaintances? He drew on the cigar.
"I'm going back about three years. I overheard a couple of my clients talking, one of them in for a fitting. They were joking about it. How these adult bookstores have bulletin boards, where people—make contacts. I expect you've heard of them.
"I thought it over awhile. I don't approve of all this pornography around—seems like people equate sex just for its own sake with freedom and happiness, which isn't sense. Nellie and I had a good thing between us, and I hadn't forgotten that. But there's loneliness too. I felt like a damn fool walking in that place. All the young people around, but some not so young too. You see, I was thinking—maybe there were other people who just wanted to—make contact. Lonely people."
Mendoza said, "No creo en semejante cosa. I don't believe—"
Benson ignored him. "I spotted this one card up there right away. It just struck me as honest. All it said was, May, and a phone number, and, widow, 55, straight. I memorized the number. Didn't get up the nerve to call for a couple of days, but I finally did. She sounded honest, too. Suggested we meet for a cup of coffee some place. It was a restaurant way down on Fairfax, I'd guess a place she'd never go usually. We talked—sort of sized each other up. We had about the same backgrounds. She was being plenty cautious, she said right away no last names. That was all right with me. It was later on, when I took her back to her car—it was dark and maybe that was easier for her—she came out plain. She said her husband had died a couple of years before, and she'd been used to a lot of action with him, she was feeling kind of desperate. She didn't know any men except her friends' husbands—kind of like me. She didn't want to get married again. She said she was nervous going in there, putting up a card—all the queers and kinky kind—but she was, well, interested in getting together with somebody for mutual satisfaction, you might put it."
Hackett and Higgins were listening, fascinated. If Benson had been a younger man he'd have come out with the frank explicit terms; but he'd grown up in an age of reticence, and walked cautiously around the subject with euphemisms.
"She wasn't a fool, she was a lady, and she was protecting herself pretty sensibly too. How do the British put it?—no names, no pack drill. She wouldn't have taken up with any riff-raff—but neither would I," said Benson dryly. "Cut a long story short, we thought we suited each other all right."
"You mean—" Hackett was enthralled.
"I've got a house on Courtney Street. Pretty well shielded by shrubbery, and all our old neighbors who knew me have moved away anyway. She used to come there, after dark. We had something going for a while," said Benson. He looked at his cigar, which was nearly smoked through, and hesitated, and for the first time he looked embarrassed.
"Good God," said Higgins. "That—that conventional—what was it you said, Luis, cardboard figure, colorless-visiting the sick and doing good works—"
"Go on," said Hackett to Benson.
Benson put out the cigar in the ashtray on Mendoza's desk. He looked down at the floor, and he was looking a little flushed. He said, "Well, to put it plain, she was crazy for it, she couldn't get enough. I—quite frankly, she was a little too much for me to handle."
Hackett laughed. "They do say, some older women—there was Ninon de Lenclos, George. And Sarah Bernhardt. But what a story. That prim matron, sipping tea after shopping with her lady friends—"
"Well," said Benson, "it occurred to me that her husband must have been quite a fellow. She was— Well, after awhile I got the idea that she was seeing another man. I don't know if that was so, or how she—made contact. Probably the same way we had met."
Hackett chortled. "You have handed us an epic, Mr. Benson."
"I don't know about that," said Benson soberly. "It was a year and half ago I went down to San Diego on a visit to my married daughter, and when I came back I—just didn't call her again. May. That was all I ever knew her by-May. But," and he tapped the newspaper, "that's her all right. Well, gentlemen, that's about it. I'll just say that one of Nellie's old friends and I are planning to get married, and that's that. But May—" he looked at the picture thoughtfully— "I've got to tell you, I don't think she'd have taken to doing without it for a year and a half. She was—quite a lady for action, gentlemen?
"Of all the damned queer stories," said Higgins, "this is—"
"What occurred to me," said Benson, "is that— Well, I was very sorry to learn that something like this had happened to her, you know. But I did wonder—and I expect after all I've been saying, you're wondering about it too—if she had been still, er, making contacts, well, it could be she'd got a little less cautious in the kind of men she picked up with."
Hackett said, "Yes, of course that's the implication. What do you think, Luis?"
But Mendoza, for the first time that anyone remembered, was stricken speechless with astonishment.
TEN
ABOUT FIVE MINUTES after Benson went out, there was a call to an attempted heist at a supermarket, with some wild shooting going on; they all went out on that, and it occupied some time, with the market manager and one of the heisters shot dead and the second heister wounded.
When they got back, Lake had a little news for them. The blonde lady-heister had refused to talk, but had now been identified through her prints; she had a little pedigree for forgery from four years back. Her name was Emily Bellucci, and her husband Tony was doing time for armed robbery, in Susanville. And the D.A.'s office had decided not to charge Alicia Contreras, was turning her case over to social services.
By then, of course, Mendoza had recovered his usual equilibrium. "Don't," he said to Hackett, "make it such a salacious little dirty joke, Art. Human beings and human nature. And I disagree with you that Marion Stromberg had got down to picking up anything male, and inadvertently ended up with a violent hood of some sort. De seguro que no. She was exactly what Benson tells us, cautious and covering up—she wasn't about to lay herself open to blackmail or any other kind of danger. Whatever man she was—mmh—meeting at the moment, she'd have sized him up very carefully, just as she did Benson."
"So how come she'd taken up with one who ended up killing her?" countered Hackett. "At least we know now what that phone call was—my God, she wanted action all right, a night like that in that downpour of rain—"
"We don't know how she was killed," said Mendoza. "But I'll lay a bet, if and when we do come across that one, Art, he'll be just such another one as Benson—a widower, a bachelor, around her own age, somebody like herself without many social contacts—and fairly fastidious."
Hackett gave a crack of laughter and said that wasn't exactly the word he'd have used. "And why should a man like that steal her car? When the A.P.B. hasn't turned it up in eleven days—"
"You can fill that in for yourself," said Mendoza. "He didn't. Somebody else did."
"Why drag your heels on it, Luis? Anybody can see what must have happened to the
damned-fool woman."
"If you do, it's more than I can," said Mendoza stubbornly. "If there's one thing I can claim some knowledge of it is—"
"Women," said Hackett. "I think you've lost your sure touch, boy."
"I was going to say, human nature," said Mendoza.
But of course the entire office was titillated by Benson and his interesting little story about Marion Stromberg.
* * *
Schenke, sitting alone on night watch with Piggott off, got called out at ten-thirty to a rather queer thing.
It was a quiet block on Reno Street, but a good many neighbors had been attracted out by the screams and the barking, and could supply answers for him: Mrs. Nora Reid had lived in the old four-unit apartment for years. She must be getting on for eighty, they told Schenke. She always took her dog out for a last walk around the block about ten o'clock; and tonight about that time a good many people heard screams and snarling and came out to find the poor old lady sprawled unconscious on the sidewalk, her handbag missing, and the dog, as one woman put it, "slavering at the mouth."
Schenke wouldn't have quite said that. The dog was excited and had blood on its muzzle. It was a brown-and-white mongrel about the size of a large fox terrier. The old woman hadn't a mark on her; it looked as if she'd been knocked down on the sidewalk. But there was a good deal of blood around, and it made a regular trail leading down the block to the corner. Using a flashlight, Schenke followed it up to the corner, where it tapered off: some temporary bandage slapped on? Everybody said the dog was a good watchdog, would have taken after anybody who attacked the old lady. As it evidently had. Schenke found her handbag in the street just past the corner; the billfold in it contained four dollars and some change. Somebody called her daughter up in Hollywood to come and get the dog; she had lived alone.
Well, it was to be hoped she would go on living; she had a concussion and was still unconscious when the ambulance had come. Schenke got Duke out from the lab to get samples of the blood, and Duke said, squatting over a splotch on the curb, "You know, this looks like arterial blood to me, Bob. The way it was pumping out in spurts. I'll bet that dog caught somebody in a vital spot—femoral artery for choice."
"Yes," said Schenke. It could conceivably turn into a homicide. He went back to the office and alerted all the emergency wards and clinics around to report anybody in with severe dog bites. Nothing else came in, and he had time to write the report on it.
Palliser got in early on Saturday morning; even Farrell wasn't there. He hadn't sat down when there was a call from the desk downstairs: the emergency ward at the General.
"Yes?" said Palliser. It was a doctor talking about a patient with dog bites. The patient was still there, they'd been asked to inform this number, the doctor understood it was a police matter. "Thanks very much, we'll get back to you, Doctor," said Palliser. And then Farrell came in and behind him Mendoza.
The night report explained the dog bites. Palliser went over to the hospital with Glasser. The old lady would probably be all right, but of course she could have been killed; she was little and thin. "I don't know what the Homicide office is doing in this," said the doctor who had called. "He's only a child. We ought to track down that dog, he said it attacked him without any provocation at all—I've called Animal Regulation? The child was twelve-year-old Billy Bowes, who lived in the block down from Mrs. Reid; his mother had brought him in last night, and was glad to see the police taking an interest. Her boy might have been killed—just going up to the pizza parlor on Third to bring back a snack for everybody, and it must have been that great big dog of Tomlinson's, the thing was always getting over the fence, and it had attacked Billy for no reason at all, it ought to be shot, he'd been bleeding like a stuck Pig—
They went into the ward to see Billy, who'd had some blood pumped into him and was sitting up, still feeling sorry for himself. He was a big fat lump of a boy who undoubtedly outweighed the old lady by twenty pounds.
Palliser said, "It wasn't the Tomlinsons' dog that bit you, was it, Billy?"
"I dunno," he said. "I guess so. The only dog around there."
"What about Mrs. Reid's dog?"
He plucked at the sheet. "That little ole thing."
"He went after you pretty hot when you snatched her bag, didn't he?" said Glasser. "Gave you some trouble you hadn't expected."
Billy was surprised. "How'd you know that?"
"Because we're detectives," said Palliser patiently. "Was that the first time you'd done anything like that?"
The boy jerked his head once. "I—I saw her comin' along the sidewalk—everybody says she's got lots of money. I never thought that little no-count mutt would take after me like that."
It was a piddling little thing to waste time on, but technically speaking it was assault. There'd be all the paperwork, and Billy would come up before a juvenile court judge and be put on probation. But maybe he'd been scared enough that he'd think twice in the future before acting on impulse.
There were a couple of new heists to work, left over from Thursday night. Wanda, Grace and Galeano were still working through the Traffic records. Mendoza was fidgeting around the office, after having re-read all the reports on Marion Stromberg and the Jackmans, when around noon Glasser slapped down the report he'd been reading and said, "This is a Goddamned waste of perfectly good time, Lieutenant. Nothing's going to show."
"Claro que no," said Mendoza absently. "Probably not, Henry. I was woolgathering again. And damn it, I never talked to Jackman's sister, she might—"
Higgins looked up from his typewriter. "It's a bastard, Luis, but there's just no handle on that one. If there were anything to point a direction—but there isn't."
"No," said Mendoza. And after a moment, "And of course it'd be no damned use at all to look at that bulletin board. Hell."
Glasser, Galeano and Wanda went out to lunch. Higgins finished his report, covered the typewriter, and had just said, "Come on, Luis, let's go and have lunch," when Sergeant Farrell got a new call. A body, in an apartment on Hoover. "Oh, hell," said Higgins.
They went to take a quick look. It was a pleasant, unpretentious furnished apartment in a six-unit place, and the owner lived on the premises. It was the owner who had found the body, coming to put a new washer in the faucet in the kitchen.
"He only moved in last month," said the owner, whose name was Thorkild. "His name's James Amberson. I don't know much about him. He seemed to be a very nice fellow, a quiet tenant. I do know he was a retired Navy man—career Navy, he was in twenty-five years."
Prodded to remember anything else, he said, "Well, he introduced me to his sister once, she came to see him. I think her name's Suttner."
The body was that of a Negro male about fifty, and it looked as if he'd been beaten to death. There was a heavy-duty wrench on the floor near the body, covered with blood. It had, at a guess, happened last night.
Higgins called for a lab truck and they looked through the place desultorily. There was an address book by the telephone, and an address and phone number for Suttner in it: View Park. Mendoza was still looking abstracted; Higgins took him out to Federico's and they had lunch, late. Now there'd be all the paperwork on this thing, but if Higgins read the signs right at least Mendoza was admitting that his little idea about the Traffic records was a dud.
They went out to View Park after lunch. The Suttner house was a sprawling brick place with an immaculate shaven lawn, and old trees shading it. The Suttners were both home, and after the first shock and grief had spent itself they poured out emotion and information in quantity. Mrs. Lucy Suttner was a buxom brown woman, still rather pretty at forty plus; he was darker and quieter, a dental technician at a laboratory downtown.
"If he only hadn't taken up with that woman!" she burst out. "I know that's what's behind this—you know it's got to be, Clyde! Didn't I try to tell him—he was a plain fool to get married for the first time at nearly fifty! Just retired from the Navy, he made chief petty officer, a good pension,
and he has to meet that woman! Oh, she puts on a good front, and of course she flattered him and buttered him up no end, just looking for an easy meal ticket—any woman could see through her kind, but men—"
"Well, I'm bound to say even I saw through her," said Suttner wryly. "Myra Carpenter, he met her at a party somewhere, and she really got him corraled—of course she's quite a looker."
"Well, he found out!" said Mrs. Suttner. "He wasn't married to her a month before he found out! She's got a son by her first marriage, and he's a wild one—we heard he's got a police record and I'll swear he's a dope addict—always at her for money, and the money she took off Jim! And bringing his no-good friends around—"
"But we understood," said Higgins, "he'd just moved into that apartment?
"Last month. He'd had enough, and he came to his senses and saw what a fool he'd been. He'd left her, he was going to divorce her. And I know she's behind this somehow! Her and that terrible boy of hers. Oh, why did Jim have to meet her? He could have had such a good life, the pension, he was only fifty .... "
They told Mendoza and Higgins where she was living; they supposed she was still there, an apartment on Hampton Court in Hollywood.
"This," said Higgins as they got back into the Ferrari, "looks pretty damn obvious, doesn't it? He was going to divorce her, so they had the bright idea of killing him while she was still eligible for his Navy life insurance. It makes you tired, Luis."
"Yes," said Mendoza, but he still sounded abstracted. Instead of heading for Hollywood he started back downtown. "You can write a first report on it, George," and then he was silent all the way back to the office.
There, he told Farrell to get Jackman for him; and he so far remembered his manners that before asking the question he wanted to, he inquired after the well-being of the family. "Well, the funeral was yesterday," said Jackman. "We got the notice that we could have the bodies. They're buried up at Forest Lawn. At least it was a nice day."
"Yes," said Mendoza. "Is your sister better?"
